> On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:23:57 -0500, Patricia Moser <moserp@sidwell.edu>
> wrote:
> I've had my eye on Google Apps for literally years. I've long felt school
> IT
> departments are too small to be in the email/calendaring business where
> economies of scale are so important.
Amen to that!
> The biggest single negative I've encountered is the lack of sharable
> address
>
books. For example, many administrative office use shared address books, but
>
> there is no easy way to do this in Google Apps.
I have a workaround for that, and there are probably a few more. I
personally own my own domain, and the hosting service's software allows me
to create not only single email addresses, but addresses with "recipes,"
which can forward to one or more other addresses. In this domain I've
created addresses for each of the classes I teach, which then any member of
the class can send to (as could spammers if they knew it). The advantage of
this over having our IT people create and modify the membership of these
groups for me is that *I* can do it when *I* need it without bothering them.
Anyway, the point is that for about $120/year you could get a domain that
would allow you to create your "shared addresses," and then just tell
everyone what they are.
Of course, there's also Google Groups, but the problem there, as I recall,
is that you have to verify each user you add (or have them verify
themselves). There may also be an issue for some with the ads that are a
part of any communication with the group.
But wait! Couldn't you do the following:
1. Create a Gmail address for each group you wanted to send to (say
faculty@peddie.org)
2. Create a group within faculty's contacts that included all the
faculty members (say facultygroup)
3. Create a filter within faculty@peddie.org that auto-forwarded all
mail received by it to facultygroup
Seems like that might work.
Below is a KB page I wrote for those who expressed an interest in
> participating in our Google Apps pilot which contains some useful
> information including pluses and minuses.
>
One of the minuses you mentioned was the inability to read Gmail offline.
But they do allow you to POP, so that shouldn't be a problem if you have a
standard desktop client.
I have to admit that this whole new paradigm of web-based services
(especially as they're used to avoid having people spam through your server)
seems a bit like "everything old is new again" as I definitely remember when
you had to actively be on dial-up to read your email. But with most people
having "all the time on" connections these days, I guess it's not a big
problem.
Although, you know, it would be nice if there were (and maybe there is, and
I don't know it) some way to download your entire "Google space" to your own
machine every night so that you at least had offline copies of everything if
you needed it.
Finally, one thing I don't like about Gmail is the inability of it to handle
multiple sigs, based on which address I'm using it to respond from. That was
a great feature of Eudora, and I think that I might finally give up on
Eudora at home if Gmail could do variable sigs and stationery/templates.
Yes, I know that I could easily save an alternate sig into a message to
myself, or even online, and then paste it in, but variable smart sigs seems
much more elegant. But I suppose you can't have everything.
--
keg
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Keith E Gatling - Computer Instructor
Manlius Pebble Hill School
5300 Jamesville Rd
DeWitt, NY 13214
315.446.2452
http://www.gatling.us/keith
Some teachers teach subjects. Others teach students.
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